How are FPGAs programmed?
As mentioned previously, the greatest hurdle to FPGA adoption is the developer’s perception of usability. Usually a computer engineer must design the hardware via a description language such as Verilog or VHDL. This process involves defining the transfer of data between registers, which is a distinct departure in the practices most software engineers use. A newer approach is to model the behaviour of the entire system via SystemC, which permits a higher level of …
Are GPUs the next wave in HPC?
AMD’s recent purchase of ATI was accompanied by an announcement that AMD will introduce “Fusion,” a combination CPU and GPU intended for general-purpose computing. This is on the heals of the work from PeakStream and RapidMind in the arena of stream programming, which attempts make software development on GPUs easier for non-graphics applications. It certainly appears that GPUs are leading the wave in vector processing, which is of course complimentary to multi-core architectures.
For …
What is Marlet?
When computing with really large data sets, such as in the earth or life sciences, it is usually easier to pass the function rather than the data. Marlet is a work-flow language for distributed data analysis; it is based on the principles of functional programming and allows the user to operate while abstracting the underlying system. The user provides abstract functions that are converted to concrete functions at runtime when concrete data is …
